


Batman: A Dark Night

by Nullescience



Category: Batman - All Media Types
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-16
Updated: 2019-09-16
Packaged: 2020-10-19 21:09:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 917
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20663810
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nullescience/pseuds/Nullescience
Summary: I was twelve when my parents died. On a torrentuous, late autumn night like tonight. I had thought, in the naive way children do, that that was the end. A pain so cold I would carry it inside my heart forever. A woe-is-me solemn comfort that nothing could ever hurt me so much as that night had. I was wrong.I was very wrong.





	Batman: A Dark Night

I was twelve when my parents died. On a torrentuous, late autumn night like tonight. I had thought, in the naive way children do, that that was the end. A pain so cold I would carry it inside my heart forever. A woe-is-me solemn comfort that nothing could ever hurt me so much as that night had. I was wrong. 

I was very wrong.

I drove up to the asylum myself. Along a lonely cut of asphalt headed north through the Adirondacks. The rain growing louder, until you could feel it in your ears. Wipers tick-tocking as restless as a metronome.

I reached the hospital shortly after midnight. He had chopped through the lock and chain with these heavy bolt cutters, now discarded off to the side of the road. Pushing aside the wrought iron gates, I entered the asylum grounds. 

The Elizabeth Arkham Sanatorium loomed before me. Her monolithic brick walls, overgrown with woody hedera, a large cavity punched straight through the dome of her roof. And these windows, rows of windows, vantablack, which starred out at you...expectant, like freshly-hollow eyes. 

I slipped in the mud as I exited the car, and again as I raced for the corkscrew staircase that lead to the upper levels. I passed empty rooms, chock full of mothballed bed sheets and layers of dust thick enough to drown yourself in. The stale musk of rat defecation clung to the air. Roaches, mold, junkie paraphernalia. There had been living things here, but nothing well. I found him at the observatory, a looking glass perch over what had once been the sanatorium gardens. He stood upon the balcony. 

“Crane!” I shouted. 

He had his back to me, watching the lightning rage through the mountains. His lab coat, stained currant red, straw hair waving wildly in the wind. I stepped closer and he held up a hand to stop. I did. 

The doctor had duct-taped a hypodermic syringe to each of his fingers. “Haloperidol," he said admiring one digit, then the next, “fluoxetine...butorphanol…how remarkably easy it is to manipulate the brain,” Crane looked at me, “once you have the right tools.”

“What happened Crane?”

Crane glanced around as if suddenly aware of his surroundings, “I used to work here," he said mournfully, "first job out of medical school, just a weasley intern scuttling the halls, trying to make things right...fix minds."

“The vaccine, Crane? What happened at the lab?”

The doctor stiffened. “I killed them,” he explained, matter-of-factly, icicles in his throat, “Killed them all and took the virus.”

“Why? Where is it?”

Crane slowly turned around, still holding something behind his back. “It’s too late. I dumped it in the sewers. By now half the city must be infected. By this morning...all of them. Worst biological outbreak in this country's history and everyone will wake up tomorrow none the wiser. It’ll burn through their collective minds, rewiring as it goes. Then vanishing without a trace. The virus works Mr. Wayne…fixes minds...” he smiled to himself, adjusting his glasses, “just not as we expected.” 

The doctor took a step back, towards the balcony edge, where the copper railing had long since eroded away. The moment stretched on like molasses, a minute within a minute. Then, with neither flare nor warning he held out his other hand, in which he held what appeared to be greyish ground beef. It was dripping.

“You know the thing about the mind, about consciousness...it's...it's a funny thing." He turned the meat over in his hands. "They used to dissect brains like this, looking for the spot, the ‘res cogitans’, the place where the soul resided. Their best guess was that it was right...here," he skewered the organ with a finger. "Pineal gland..throne of the soul. You know what it actually does?"

Crane dropped the brain which landed with a splat between his doc Martin boots. "Pretty much nothing."

"Jonathan...you’re not well."

"See, that’s the problem," Crane continued, whispering just loud enough to hear. "We’ve been trying to fix the mind all this time. Identify what makes us human and repair it 'good as new'. But it's an illusion. You…are an illusion, Mr Wayne. Consciousness...self, it's all nothing more than the fancy liquid crystal display of an otherwise obsolete CPU. A puppet dance of shadows on Darwinian cave walls. That's the problem with trying to fix minds. They were never really broken, because they were never really real. It's the world that's rotten, always has been. And we're just a symptom..." He fell silent, then became more resolved, taking his hand and sinking a needle in his arm. His eyelids fluttered upward as the drugs hit the vein. He glanced at me.

"Dull the pain, Mr. Wayne. Dull the pain."

"Jon, we can fix this, there must be a way. An antidote, some way to reverse the...”

Crane shook his head gently, taking another step backwards. Then another.

“No!” I lunged for him, grabbing a hold of his lab coat. I hit the balcony like dropped dumbbells, my shoulder wrenched from its socket but my grip holding firm. I had had him, if only for a moment, I had felt his weight in my hands, but then he was gone. I rolled back, pulling his torn lab coat over me like a blanket, curling up and squeezing my eyes against the pain. Nauseous, unable to breath. If I had only acted sooner. If I had only…


End file.
